Five Hundred Colours
by Lady Otori
Summary: Ino couldn't paint for shit. Sai had thought long and hard about whether or not this was an irreconcilable difference in who they were as people, but he hadn't yet come to a conclusion. [Mission Fic] [Established Relationship] [Psychological Drama] [Fluff with Hints of Smut] [Post-Canon]


The fifth and final part of my 500 followers drabbles - Ino and Sai are just too good to pass up. I always imagine their relationship a little on the sexy side.

* * *

**Red**

Ino couldn't paint for shit. Sai had thought long and hard about whether or not this was an irreconcilable difference in who they were as people but he hadn't yet come to a conclusion.

He simply hadn't expected it, surrounded by light and colour as she was in her role at her family flower shop.

Sighing, the artist felt a hand snake around his waist before drawing him closer to the warm body behind him.

"What's wrong?" a sultry voice asked. He closed dark eyes and sent a silent wish up to his brother that this mission ended soon.

"Nothing's wrong," he murmured tonelessly. _Everything's wrong. _It was the wrong sultry voice; this woman had fiery red hair and blue eyes that were a mere washed-out imitation of Ino's expressive depths. The attitude was wrong, too: Ino was loud and brash and confident at all times but when she took him to bed she liked to be loved. This woman wanted a quick fuck from a man half her age, and he'd given her it, because the Village had told him to make sure she didn't suspect the kill.

Sai wished he were lying in Ino's green atelier.

"Then come back here," said the woman - he'd forgotten her name - and he rolled over and complied, then watched with impassive eyes as the light faded from her eyes and she lost her final breath.

**Blue**

"Do I want counselling?" Sai repeated the question, incredulous.

"Yes," replied Sakura, no trace of mirth in her expression. "I try to ask everyone who works on a, a _difficult _mission, these days."

"A difficult mission." _Had it been difficult? _He'd killed the target easily enough. Came home with only a minor scratch and wouldn't have gone to the hospital at all if it weren't for Sakura's threats when he skipped. That, and it was Wednesday.

Ino worked in the ward on Wednesdays, stretching herself further and further still, part florist, part interrogator, part counsellor. Smiling at everyone with her perfect teeth and earnest blue eyes and coming home exhausted.

"No, I don't want counselling," Sai decided. "I want to have a day off at the same time as Ino."

Sakura leaned forward, arms on her knees as she discarded the professional exterior of the head of the hospital.

"You'd better have something good planned," his teammate said, using that mysterious tone of voice she adopted when he'd something interesting but not necessarily correct.

It wasn't an outright _no_, and Sai remembered that _of course_ Sakura had the power to give Ino a day off. She probably had the power to give anyone in the village a holiday, whether they wanted one or not. He'd forgotten. To him, Sakura would always just be the open, willing woman who honed her patience on him and taught him the fundamentals of interpersonal relationships. He'd only been venting to her, his habit of speaking his inner thoughts in her presence seeping past the professional examination.

"I want to teach Ino how to paint," he offered. "I think it would be a good way to relax together."

Sakura pressed a finger to her chin contemplatively. "Teach her to paint, huh?"

"Yes, she's very bad. I am deciding whether or not this is an irreconcilable difference in who we are as people."

The pink-haired medic opposite him gave him a flat look. "What colours are you giving her to use?"

Sai frowned. Sakura's own artistry extended to the mastery with which she stitched people back together and no further, so the question wasn't coming from an expert perspective. She had to know something he didn't.

"The usuals; pale shades, pinks, light blues, sometimes a bit of white or grey."

At this, Sakura snorted in derision. How she was asked on so many dates- "so pastels, then?"

"If you want to put it like that."

"I thought you were an artist, Sai. Try giving her the whole palette." Sakura clapped her hands together, the signal that she'd imparted whatever wisdom she saw fit to give him that day.

"If you insist…?" He didn't understand.

"I do," and she stood up, steering him out of her office with a tick against his health record. "And tell Ino not to come in next Wednesday, OK?"

**Black**

Ino clearly thought he was either breaking up with her or dying, based on the look on her face and sombre outfit she wore as she appeared in their usual meeting spot.

"Good afternoon, Beautiful," Sai greeted as always.

"Yes, afternoon," Ino replied. "A random Wednesday afternoon, where I am supposed to be at work, but I'm not."

Even the ends of her ponytail looked disheartened.

"Are people not supposed to appreciate days off?" he queried.

Ino huffed as she leaned into his side. "Not when your best-friend-who's-definitely-not-your-boss comes in and tells you your boyfriend has something to do with you this afternoon, and to go home."

Sai blinked. Sakura usually had more tact than that, and he said as much to the blonde beside him. Thankfully, she simply snorted lightly.

"You try being tactful after a thirty six hour surgery," Ino said, shrugging. He noticed she hadn't taken his arm like she usually did, so with carefully slow hands he reached out and placed her deceptively delicate hand on his forearm.

It didn't elicit the reaction he wanted.

"Oh _no,_" Ino wailed, drawing the attention of the baker who worked near her home. "You _are _dying. You wouldn't let me touch you if we were breaking up."

_Knew it_. Sai tried to stop his hand from tracking across his face as he heaved a sigh but there wasn't much that he could sneak past the interrogation team's ace. "I'm not dying and I'm not breaking up with you," he reassured the woman walking next to him. "I'm taking us on a nice, relaxing day out because I thought you deserve it and I need it."

The artist watched as his date stopped in the street. "Hm," she mumbled, and he caught a hint of a blush before the inevitable confident flick of her ponytail restored her to life. 'If I'd known that, I wouldn't have worn all this _black_."

**Kaleidoscope**

As it turned out, Ino _could _paint. Her canvas was not the pristine white of paper or the crinkle of leaf nor any other medium Sai was familiar with.

No, Ino painted with passion. The day had started innocuously enough, two boards set up side by side and his whole palette of paints spread between them - Sai _always _took Sakura's advice - but an hour in and Ino had simply placed her hand down in the fledgling colours he'd mixed and kissed him soundly.

Like always, he responded with all the love he could give. And when Ino tracked her fingers in the purest blue he had ever created and mixed it together with the paleness of her skin he was spellbound by her art.

"There must be a hundred colours here," she said, laughing, and Sai counted a hundred more in the creases of her smile. And another hundred in the way her hair shimmered in the light. A hundred, and then a hundred again, in the flecks of magic in her eyes.

"I think," he whispered, breathless, "that you're my favourite canvas of all."

She leaned over him, blanketing him in a curtain of gold, and finally, finally, Sai could close his eyes without the painted red woman of his mission slinking behind his eyelids.

And then Ino whispered 'then let's make art' and for a while, Sai forgot there was anyone else in the world at all.


End file.
